s a demonstration of canonical forms and stress reduction complemented/guided by multidimesional scaling, I’ve created an animation which shows the process applied to each image in the Face Recognition Grand Challenge (FRGC) 2.0 set — albeit Fall Semester only in this case — in turn, in order to approach a more mutually-isometric and pose-agnostic state where distances are tied to inherent surface details (curvature, size, etc.) and the accompanying static image, as seen below, shows the original image too (added at the top). To use this within an objective function it will need to be clearer how points are selected consistently and where correspondences can autonomously be chosen to improve overall performance. The triangulation in this case is Delaunay-based although 3 methods have been implemented and they offer room for further experimental work. The factors affecting performance may be the PCA component, the triangulation, the placement of points, the optimisation of lengths, the pre-processing (ICP for instance), and few minor technicalities less worthy of consideration. Each one of these represents one parameter among many but feasibility tests — those exploring whether the overall framework is effective in the first place (distances as an encoded signature resistant to expressions) — must come first. Based on a preliminary look, this ought to serve as a reasonable discriminant, but many of the pertinent parts of the framework may need tweaking based on trials and errors.

Note: this is an except from an ongoing project and a document exceeding 200 pages so far. It will be released later this year.

inally, for the first time ever, I have gotten a site whose front page is PageRank 7. That would be Techrights. I didn’t see it coming and this is part of a group effort, so it’s a victory for many of us who worked on it for years. I cannot think of another Linux-oriented site which has PageRank 7 or higher. It’s an important milestone for sure, even if it’s mostly symbolic.

Today was generally a great day and I met an old friend who is now a boxer. Did some programming, ran successful experiments, and some of the changes are compiled without an issue, removing the zlib dependency from Cyrus. Now is the time to have these tested and the plan is to use the existing interfaces with some test data and detect mis-correspondence in CRC polynomials. Tomorrow, heavy blogging will resume and maybe a trip to London will wait until Monday.

HIS month’s schedule has been erratic so far and I spent a lot of time outdoors, owing more than anything to improved weather. Today too I spent almost all day at a friend’s house. Cycling has become a lot of fun, especially along the canals here in the UK. The terrain is rough though, so the bike breaks down quite routinely. I will try to spend the next two weeks blogging a little more as I never neglected my online activity as much as I have recently. Well, frankly, not much has happened either. Since Novell is dead, the “Boycott Novell” push is hardly necessary anymore. We won.

hen I was about 20 I wrote down some efficiency tips that I realised I had adopted (very out of date and potentially embarrassing, going back to the days of static-only pages in this Web site). I can look back at my teenage years and recall being bored and dissatisfied with some of the ways I was passing time. This mostly improved when I started my Ph.D. and derived influence from my boss.

While making a lot of time for exercise and enough time for sleep and social life, I do always try to maximise use of my work time. In particular, here are ways to combine work and boring chores. I typically read papers while I shave, as the latter task is mostly mechanical (shaver, no blades), I listen to music/lectures while preparing to leave or showering, typically audiocasts while doing jobs around the house, and typing of blog posts (including this one) between sets at the gym, unless friends are nearby, in which case I speak to them. There are good devices with full-sized keyboard that make this possible, especially in particular gyms at quieter times of the day. This leaves a lot of the complex jobs that require multitasking to the desktop, which has a vast workspace, steady Internet connection, and event alerts. This actually helps promote the argument that we decreasingly depend on just the old-style desktop, assuming devices integrate correctly. This always leave me wondering how many aspects of ours lives will depend on Linux (which is huge in embedded and mobile devices, not just the server side). But that’s a ramble for another day…